Scale up your business or perish

I have always wondered what Satyen Vyas of  Bangalore-based Vitage Group
was doing in the IT industry. He is tall, handsome and well, a little dark. He
should have been in the film industry or into ramp modeling. I am dead sure that
this 38-year-old boyish looking guy could have easily given all the top models a
good run for their money.

However, this IIM Bangalore graduate of the 1991 batch choose our very own IT
industry. And after a stint of five years with Godrej, selling printers and UPS
systems, he joined the then fledging Vitage Systems as a partner. From a Rs 1.4
crore company 10 years back, its topline for 2006-07 stands at almost Rs 120
crore. And the manpower strength today stands at close to 400 from 10 in 1996.

Asim Raina Editor

That's great going by any standards and any other person in his place would
have been content with the achievement. But, neither he nor his partner Alton
Viegas, thought that they had achieved pretty much what they had to. So, over
the last three to four years, Vitage started a services division to decrease
their reliance on the plain vanilla box pushing. And, as expected, they met with
good success and finally spun off this division into a full-fledged company
called Vitage Technologies.

The real story for this jodi began last year when they started offering
remote management services. Realizing the need for quality certification, they
went for ISO and have now got the ISO 9001, ISO 20001 and ISO 27001 under their
belt. In the process, Vitage is one amongst a handful-less than 15-companies who
have received all the three coveted certificates in India.

Interestingly, that doesn't mean they will get out of the traditional
hardware business. Rather, they intend to give equal emphasis to both. While the
hardware business will earn the bread, the services part should get in the
bacon.

If you are thinking that I am writing a company profile here, you are wrong.
My intention here is to highlight the urgent need for the Indian IT channel
community to scale up their business or be prepared to perish. If you are not
constantly on the look out for newer business opportunities and do not look
beyond your immediate day-to-day business, you risk getting left behind.

That is something my friend Vyas will never do. From a spanking new office on
the airport road with a huge window that gives him a great view of airplanes
landing and taking off, he is already crystal gazing into the future direction
of his business.